


Between Earth and Sky

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Genre: Multi, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Canon, Sex Magic, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 16:29:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12136482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: Aboard the Imperial airship Beshelar is appreciated by the two most important men in his life.





	Between Earth and Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dragonsigma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonsigma/gifts).



Once, the gentle sway of the Imperial airship had disconcerted Deret. Unsteady footing was a distraction at best and a death sentence at worst for a soldier, and though he hardly noticed the motion now (“it seems we have all gained our airlegs,” Cala had reflected) a frisson of uncertainty remained, a strange sense of discomfiture and nervous anticipation.  The previous bone-jarring carriage ride through the streets of Csedo to the airship mooring dock following an interminable leave-taking ceremony rounding off their two weeks there had been unpleasant but, at the very least, predictably so. Aboard an airship, anything could happen, and only once they set down in Cetho did he imagine he would feel once more at ease.

For now, to his left the Emperor seemed lost in thought, having just finished a short version of his evening ablutions with the single edocharis who had accompanied them. Their weary progress down the low-ceilinged hall leading to the Imperial quarters halted outside the door where the Second Nohecharei stood, having secured the cabin and the entire emperor’s wing of the airship. “Serenity,” Kiru Athmaza addressed the Emperor, who stepped past her into the dimly gaslit chamber with a nod and a weary smile. “Wouldst anything of us ere you retire?”

“No. Thank you, Kiru,” Edrehasivar replied before turning back to Deret and Cala. “If you would, however,” he told them, voice low but level, “you are welcome to remain here. Both of you.”

He might have declined. He had declined before, citing weariness (or nothing at all) even as the fear of rejecting an Emperor’s will, no matter how unbinding, gripped him. On each occasion Edrehasivar had nodded and bade him a good night, leaving Deret standing alone in the halls of the Alcethmeret and almost indignant. This had lasted until Cala had begun to threaten him with blows from a rolled broadsheet each time he braced himself for more forceful requests or even commands. This evening, however, refusal did not seem appealing in the slightest, the lethargy of their late departure from Csedo evaporating like morning mist in the sunlight. “Serenity,” he replied, stepping into the room past the tactfully-averted gazes of the Second.

Deret had scarcely removed his boots at the threshold when a wordless exchange seemed to pass between Cala and the Emperor and he found himself trapped between them, Edrehasivar encircling his waist with avid arms to draw close and press dark, avid lips to the back of Deret’s still-bared neck, Cala urging Deret back toward the wall-mounted bed to press him down onto it, straddling his hips with a perfunctory forthrightness that made Deret gasp despite himself. "Seem'st so tense," the Emperor observed, climbing onto the bed behind Deret to press a kiss to the side of his neck.

"I wonder," Cala said with a smile directed more at Deret than the Emperor, "how thou canst possibly tell."

Deigning not to dignify the statement with a response, Deret twisted his head around to press his lips to the Emperor's for a deep, licking kiss. "I am perfectly well, Serenity," he said once they had both surfaced for air, murmuring slightly as Cala's mouth brushed the small amount of his collarbone visible under the collar of his shirt.

"Still," the Emperor replied, "I know airship travel does not agree with thee. Wouldst allow us to take thy mind from it?"

Deret drew a deep, steadying breath, focusing his attention long enough for a ragged, fervent " _Please_."

Cala's long, spidery fingers busied themselves with the fastenings of Deret’s tabard, then his tunic. The material of the latter, followed by his undershirt, brushed over Deret’s stiffly peaked nipples with ridiculous intensity and he could not repress a tremor of desire as he was left bare-chested before the two. He fought the urge to hide his face in shame. Even now, so many years on from the days when none of them possessed any sort of true experience in matters of love and desire, it was easier for him to lose himself in the task of serving his lord in this wise. Far better to prove his devotion here as elsewhere, sparing no thought for his own pleasure until coaxed to it by the desire these encounters never ceased to drive to a fever pitch. Being the subject of all attention, as Cala leaned forward to brush thin, eager lips over Deret’s still-clothed shaft, as Edrehasivar pressed one of Deret’s hands to his mouth to kiss and suck along the length of each finger, left him torn between self-conscious mortification and a desire so overwhelming that he did not know what to do with his limbs, his gaze, his voice. It was perverse and improper and perhaps in his younger days he might have counted it wrong, yet now he could hardly have mustered the words to protest if he had wished to in the slightest.

“Wilt trade places with me, Cala?” Edrehasivar asked, taking his mouth from Deret’s hand long enough to pose the question even as his fingers played avidly over Deret’s.

“Of course,” Cala replied, extending to his feet with only a slight stagger as the ship was buffeted by a momentary gust of wind. Climbing onto the bed behind Deret, a whisper of fabric later and Deret could feel bare skin and the jut of ribs against his own bared back as well as, further down, the heat and silky-hard press of his cock. He felt Cala’s teeth nip at the side of his neck and gasped, allowing his head to fall back onto Cala’s shoulder. A moment, and he felt his hair spill over both their shoulders and chests as Cala reached up to undo his topknot. The feeling was intimate in a way Deret would never, could never have otherwise imagined, and he allowed his eyes to close briefly, lost in the sensation if only for a moment’s reprieve.

In front of them, meanwhile, knelt Edrehasivar, gazing up at him with adoration that made Deret’s throat seize. The delicate beauty of his younger days had gradually matured into something deeper and more stately as he neared his thirty-third year, the finely structured bones of his face still prominent, the skin subtly lined and shaped into a patrician gravity that strengthened the already beautiful Drazhadeise features into something that might have been shaped by a dachensol’s chisel out of the finest silvery marble. The few strands of early silver-white in his hair lay there like shooting stars in a night sky, a comparison the Empress had once made and which Deret, even with his tin ear for poetry, had never forgotten. “Wouldst have thy lord’s mouth on thee, Lieutenant?” he asked, voice entirely absent the unsure note that it had taken many such encounters to entirely banish.

“As Your Serenity will,” Deret breathed, the hunger in his voice audible even to himself.

With that, Edrehasivar VII Zhas, lord of all the lands currently passing below them, lowered his head in an erotic facsimile of modesty to take near the entirety of Deret’s needily throbbing cock into his mouth. With a ragged exhalation, Deret grasped Cala’s fingers (currently trailing a path along his side) only to be rewarded with a tender brush of those clever fingers over the thin, jagged knife scar along his other arm. The memory of their first encounter, the way the Emperor had pressed his lips to it with a reverence like prayer, made Deret’s breath catch near-painfully in his throat. The scar itself was not especially sensitive, had rarely ever pained him since its healing, but the mere sentiment was enough to set him shivering as little pain had ever induced him to. _Sentimental fool,_ his better nature muttered, but he paid the thought no mind.

Every hitch in their first entanglements, every murmured “softer” or “use the pad, not thy nails” had smoothed and eased through the years into a comforting familiarity near as pleasurable as the acts themselves. Deret now knew just the pressure with which to card his fingers through the Emperor’s sleep-braided hair without worrying that he forced his head down uncomfortably, knew just how hard to grasp Cala’s hand in his as the other began to trace fiery-cold patterns over his chest. It was a more frivolous use of the mazeise arts than Deret, at any other time, would have countenanced without some sort of indication of his disapproval. As it was now, however, disapproval seemed more trouble than it was worth. Pinned between the two of them he allowed himself to luxuriate, accepting this spendthrift’s surfeit of affection as he could rarely bring himself to when not entirely drunk on lust and happiness. “Serenity,” he gasped as he felt the Emperor’s hand curve around the thick muscle of his inner thigh, its length hot against his sac.

Edrehasivar sat back on his heels, gaze fixed on Deret’s face. In lieu of a groan of disappointment, Deret bit his tongue hard. “My name,” the Emperor instructed, tone even and soft but with the core of steel that Deret recognized from countless Corazhas meetings and instructions to those beneath him. “Use my true name, Deret.”

Even the use of _his_ true name was enough to provoke a thoroughly undignified whimper. Deret could palpably feel the twitch of Cala’s erection against the cleft of his buttocks at the order. “Ser—“ Deret began, then swallowed hard. “Maia. Forgive me.”

The tension, the galvanic strangeness of the sky's uncertainty coupled with the sure, comforting arms of those more significant (and dearer, as he counted them both in moments of greater candor) to him than any throughout the Ethuveraz, seemed to sharpen and increase every sensation. Every brush of Cala's chill fingers over his pulse points, his achingly hard nipples, the hollow of his throat, would have been enough to have him on the edge even before the Emperor—Edrehasivar— _Maia_ —lowered his head once again to kiss a wet trail up the length of his shaft before again drawing the length of it into the welcome heat of his mouth. It was all he might do to keep from letting his lord’s skilled, avid lips simply draw his climax from him then and there, a situation not aided by the newly-added press of Cala’s lips on the oversensitized tips of his ears. Desperate for something, anything, to concentrate on to retain some semblance of control he reached behind himself to grasp the base of Cala’s shaft in one hand only to feel Cala catch the same hand by the wrist, pinning it firmly to Deret’s side with another shock of fiery cold. “Later,” Cala murmured, lips close enough to Deret’s ear to brush the raised whorls. “Let us please thee.”

With an agonized noise of desire, Deret clutched at the bedsheets. The medley of frustration and enjoyment was maddening, the wish to entirely surrender himself to the pleasure his liege and his colleague sought to impart vying with the wish to end it, to let them use him as he ought to be used (a perhaps greater pleasure in itself, for him) burgeoning with every long, sweet draw of Maia’s mouth, every rawly cold press of Cala’s fingers. It was wrong. Serving was his purpose, his all, and yet… truly, was to accept reward for such a thing so wrong?

A roaring like wind was is his ears, blood pounded behind his eyes, in his throat, between his legs, until with a small, urgent noise Maia took a deep breath before swallowing him to the hilt, the slippery, urgent heat of his throat tearing a hoarse shout from Deret’s throat as he spent himself again and again, shuddering with ecstatic agony as Cala raked icy fingers up and down his chest, his sides, his thighs. His vision dimmed around the edges and shatteringly bright sparks flared behind his eyes and he was falling, falling, slumping back against Cala’s chest only to be caught there and lowered to the bed between him and Maia in bony, inexorable arms. Maia’s head was cradled in the crook of his arm and Deret circled one hand behind his head, drawing him close for a slow, bitter-tasting kiss that made his liege sigh with eager contentment.

“Our most faithful attendant,” the Emperor murmured. The swollen, indigo-flushed head of his cock brushed Deret’s thigh, and Deret reached down to encircle the shaft in his palm. “Slowly,” Maia continued, humming with pleased approval as Cala drew in to press his lips to the gracefully curved grey pillar of his neck. "We have the rest of the flight; let us make the most of it."

As the Emperor rolled over to meet his embrace, Deret closed his eyes, giving himself over to the surety of love within the uncertainty of the sky.


End file.
